Explanation:
After watching this month's lunar eclipse, amateur astronomer
Sebastien Gauthier carefully composed this montage of
telescopic images of the
Moon sliding through
planet Earth's shadow.
While the deepest part of the total eclipse corresponds to
the central exposure, the play of light across
the
lunar surface nicely demonstrates that the planet's shadow is not
uniformly dark as it extends into space.
In fact, lunar maria and montes are
still visible in the dimmed, reddened sunlight scattered into
the cone-shaped
shadow region, or umbra, by Earth's atmosphere.
For this eclipse, the
Moon's trajectory took it North of the
umbra's darker core, seen here cast over the
Moon's cratered
southern highlands.
Gauthier's telescope and camera equipment were set up near the
Trois-Rivieres College
Champlain Observatory
in Quebec, Canada.